Virtual machines may provide a variety of advantages over traditional, physical computing systems. For example, a virtualization host may execute multiple virtual machines. In addition, one may migrate the virtual machine itself (e.g., the virtual process), as well as the virtual machine disk on which the virtual machine operates, between different hardware configurations.
Entities often replicate data from a primary site to a secondary site for disaster recovery purposes. For example, if the primary site fails, then a fully complete, or substantially complete, replicated copy should be available at the secondary site in order to avoid interruptions and/or data loss.
When one attempts to migrate a virtual machine disk from an initial data store to a subsequent data store, this may cause conflicts with the goal of data replication. For example, an initial data store may be replicating one or more virtual machine disks, and a subsequent data store may also be replicating one or more virtual machine disks that are different from those being replicated at the initial data store. When a virtual machine disk is migrated from the initial data store to the subsequent data store, the subsequent data store may trigger a full synchronization operation in order to ensure that the migrated virtual machine disk is protected by replication. Unfortunately, full synchronization operations may introduce tremendous performance overheads due to transmitting virtual machine disks on the order of hundreds of gigabytes across a wide area network (or other similar network).